The Pleasures of Autumn (3 page)

Niall was holding her hand, stroking her wrist gently. His touch was warm; his familiar Irish accent was soothing. ‘You can tell me. It’s okay if you did it. We can sort
this out quietly. Maybe you made a mistake, you were tired …’

Somewhere in her foggy brain an alarm bell went off. Sinead pulled her hand away. Was she the only sane person left on the planet?

‘Do I look like a kleptomaniac housewife who drops a lipstick into her handbag when she’s doing the grocery shopping? I am not a thief and I did not steal the jewel.’

Niall stood up. ‘Great. I’m sure the judge will be delighted to hear it. Now, how about you get dressed while I unpack?’

‘Unpack?’ He was staying? He couldn’t be serious. The tiny spare room had a single bed that would barely hold a three year old and there was only one bathroom. ‘You can’t possibly stay here.’

‘Your uncle paid a million francs to get you out of jail. Until the trial is over, he’s instructed me not to let you out of my sight.’

Sinead folded her arms across her chest. He meant it. Niall Moore was going to hang around here, like a bad smell, until the trial was over? That could be months away. She stared into his flinty gaze, trying not to flinch. She could see how it would intimidate someone who was working for him. Even more eerie was the way he could flip from tender to tough in a heartbeat.

How was she going to find the real thief if he was following her around, watching her every move?

Her cousin, Summer, said that Niall didn’t do serious relationships and Sinead wondered idly if he had ever lived with a woman. She was sure that they must have female security operatives, but probably not too many.
Anyway, it was none of her business. She would have to find a way of getting rid of him. But nicely. She didn’t want Tim revoking her bail because she wouldn’t co-operate.

Sinead smiled sweetly at him. ‘Fine, if you’re sure you want to. Let me show you the spare room.’

She tried to keep her face straight as she led him to the guest bedroom. Sinead pushed open the door and turned on the light. A bare light bulb illuminated the room.

A brightly coloured duvet cover announced that she was Little Miss Fussy. The girls at the museum in London had bought it for her as a joke. They knew Little Miss Fussy slept alone.

She had been called worse things than that. It wasn’t her fault that she liked to be organized. She stifled a grin as she watched Niall survey his new home. He’d be lucky to last the night. By morning he would be gone to some plush hotel.

Niall dropped his bag on the bed, and took off his coat. He couldn’t take his eyes off her face. At close quarters, her eyes were mesmerizing. In the photo, her spectacles had obscured her best feature. Now they were on full view and he couldn’t stop staring. Niall wondered absently how she managed to wear glasses. Surely those ridiculously long lashes must catch against the lenses?

The expression in her narrowed eyes jerked him out of his reverie. ‘Take a picture, it will last longer,’ Sinead snapped.

Her lips were pressed together in a stern line. He wondered if it was her default expression, or was it just him that pissed her off. He had to admit that he hadn’t exactly made a great first impression.

It was a pity really. Looking at her objectively, he realized that she wasn’t bad looking. With a bit of effort, she’d be quite passable.

He examined the ugly dressing gown she wore and wondered what was underneath it. Not that he fancied her, but he was a man after all, with all the functioning body parts and an adequate supply of testosterone. A woman’s dressing gown begged to be opened.

He leaned in a little closer so he could peer down the front of it. While her face was still greasy with whatever gloop she had slathered on it, the skin at her neck was white with faint veins under it, and for a fascinated
moment, he allowed himself to watch the pulse of an artery. It sped up under his gaze.

The appeal of vampire novels made more sense now. He had a sudden urge to bite that delicate skin and mark it. He didn’t understand the surge of possessiveness that swamped him.

His gaze dipped to where the edges of the dressing gown met. From his superior height, he could look down and see a hint of cleavage. It was a very nice cleavage and surprisingly bountiful for such a skinny woman.

He was losing it. Since when did he get turned on by old-maid librarian types? Young old maid, he amended. According to her file, she was twenty-seven, despite the fact that she could easily pass for a woman in her late thirties.

Sinead finally realized where his eyes were straying, and yanked the edges of her dressing gown closer together. ‘God, you’re disgusting.’

‘Have you ever seen
The Secretary
?’ he asked. Maybe she was secretly kinky and he was picking up the vibes.

She glared at him. ‘No, and don’t change the subject. If you have to stay here, you can keep your eyes and your hands to yourself. I’m not going to be harassed in my own apartment.’ She took a breath, and her eyes clouded. ‘For as long as I still have it.’

Oh yeah. She was now out of work, and Geneva wasn’t exactly a cheap city to live in. He wondered what would happen to her when he found the ruby. Even if she managed to escape a jail sentence, she’d never work as a curator again.

What had possessed her? he wondered angrily. It wasn’t as if she was short of money. She might not have a share of the O’Sullivan fortune, but she was never going to
starve. And someone with her education and CV could always have found a good job. Now that was gone.

And jail was still on the cards. The Swiss were not fond of thieves. They could well make an example of the Irishwoman who had dared to steal a historic jewel from under their noses. Even her blue eyes and white skin wouldn’t save her.

‘What colour is your hair?’ he asked. It was still wrapped in a white towel.

She stared at him for a long moment until he wondered what he had said wrong. It had been a reasonable question.

‘I can see I made a big impression on you.’

Now it was his turn to stare. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We met less than four months ago in London. And you clearly have no memory of it.’ Her voice was even, but he could hear a trace of hurt.

Oh fuck.

‘I’m sorry. But I was working on your cousin’s kidnapping, I didn’t have time to check out the talent.’

‘I’m glad that my red hair qualifies me as “talent”. I’m going to dry it off and get dressed. You can unpack and settle in. I have to go to the police station to hand in my passport,’ she said bitterly. She closed the door of the bedroom firmly behind her.

When the noise of the hairdryer assured him that she was fully occupied, Niall left his room and carried out a rapid search of the small apartment. The kitchen yielded nothing except a suspicion that she was on a permanent diet or didn’t shop enough. There were a few bags of frozen vegetables, half a dozen eggs, a tiny carton of skimmed milk and a box of cereal that looked like
something scraped off the bottom of a hamster cage. There was an open bottle of Swiss white wine with one glass gone from it. She clearly didn’t entertain.

In the open-plan living room, he found a large collection of old books, many of them antiques and valuable in their own right. He wondered cynically if any of them had come from museums whose staff didn’t know they were missing. Most of them related to fine arts and jewels. One was a history of the Fire of Autumn. He flicked the pages, eyebrows rising as he noticed the list of former owners of the ruby. It seemed to have gone from India, through the dowry of Margaret Theresa of Spain, to Napoleon Bonaparte, to Archduke Ferdinand, to the Nazis before King Abdullah purchased it from Harry Winston.

With that history, it made a sort of twisted sense that someone like Sinead could give in to the craving to own it. It wasn’t just a jewel – it was a piece of history.

Tucked into the back of the book was a newspaper cutting with a photograph of Sinead holding a large ruby. Below a headline crowed about the Rheinbach scoring a coup by being able to put the fabled ruby on display for the first time in almost one hundred years.

The rest of the apartment was surprisingly bare. She had a long couch that might be more comfortable than the child-sized bed in the spare room, several floor-to-ceiling mirrors, a framed photograph of herself and her cousin Summer; arm in arm at their graduation from Trinity College Dublin and a beaming Tim O’Sullivan in the background.

He wondered why Sinead’s parents were not in the picture. Surely they would have been at her graduation? He sent a quick email to Andy to check them out.

The hairdryer switched off, so he sped up his search. Nothing much out of the ordinary, unless he counted the drawer in the tiny hallway, which yielded a pair of Gore-Tex ski gloves, perfect for a Swiss winter – and six pairs of opera gloves.

The door of the bedroom opened and she came out, dressed in jeans and a bulky jumper. It was a kaleidoscope of colours, unlike anything he had ever seen before, and it swallowed her slender body.

‘Where did you get that?’ he asked. He couldn’t decide if he loved it or hated it.

She shrugged. ‘Granny O’Sullivan knitted it for me, with all the odds and ends of leftover wool from things she had knitted for other people.’

He couldn’t suppress a pang. His own mother was a knitter, and he’d had to suffer horrors from her needles. Did she really think that an undercover operator would wear a bright red sweater patterned with dog heads? But at least she had knitted it with new wool.

‘Come on,’ he said, his voice a little rougher than he was expecting. ‘You can hand in your passport at the station and then I’ll buy you dinner.’

His rented car, or rather his Jeep, was just like him. It was large and imposing, from the don’t-mess-with-me chrome grill to the dashboard that lit up like a cockpit when he turned on the ignition. What was it with men and cars? Her cousin Summer used to joke that the bigger the car the smaller the …

‘Is something amusing you?’

‘No.’ She flushed under his intent gaze. It probably wouldn’t apply to Niall anyway. He was probably big all over. She was almost 5' 7" and taller when she wore heels, but he made her feel tiny and feminine. Sinead plucked a bobble of wool on her sweater. She had meant to go shopping for clothes, but never seemed to find the time.

Why on earth had she worn this? Her outfit would look more at home on the ski slopes than in a restaurant. She wished that she’d brought some of her Lottie clothes when she moved from London. Her first dinner date in months and she was dressed like a frump.

She couldn’t believe that Niall Moore was actually here. He had been centre stage in her fantasies for weeks after the night in the theatre, but he didn’t even remember what colour her hair was. She felt like a pathetic loser. Sinead cast a sideways glance at him from beneath her lashes. Everything about him was calm and controlled. He projected an air of quiet confidence that almost made her relax. He touched the indicator and turned onto Rue de Berne before parking the car near the police station.

She gripped the door handle. ‘I’ll be back in a few –’

‘I’m coming with you,’ he said in a tone that brooked no argument.

Sinead didn’t protest. She would be glad of his company on the walk of shame. Just then his phone rang. From the expression on his face, it was a private call and she heard the tinny echo of a woman’s voice. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and shrugged apologetically. Of course someone like him would have a girlfriend; he probably had a string of them.

Sinead slid from the car and made her way to the station. She would have to do this alone.

A wraith-thin man with spiked blond hair and a leather jacket did a double take as they passed each other at the entrance. ‘You too?’ he laughed.

Sinead glared at him. Idiot. He must be drunk. ‘Do I know you?’

‘I’d never forget a performance like that. You were sooo hot.’ He leered at her.

Sinead froze. A performance? It wasn’t possible that this man could have recognized her as Lottie. ‘You’re mistaken,’ she said with as much confidence as she could muster.

‘Baby, how could I forget? The way you worked that –’

‘You heard the lady. She doesn’t know you. Take a hike.’

She hadn’t heard Niall approach. How could someone so big move so silently? The menace in his tone was unmistakeable and the man slipped away, disappearing into the crowd on Rue de Berne. Relieved, she smiled up at him.

‘That was one of my female operatives on the phone,’ he explained. She’s having a little trouble with a client. She’s on a 24/7.’

Sinead turned away. A 24/7? He meant a job. She had probably misinterpreted those looks he had given her earlier at the apartment. She was obviously suffering from sexual deprivation.

She had thought that giving up Lottie would mean the start of a new life. No more working late nights and weekends. No more being afraid to date a guy in case he found out about her other life. But the months without Lottie had been, well, dull. She had lost something. A bright
spark of energy had disappeared from her life and she couldn’t remember the last time she had –

‘Good evening, Mademoiselle O’Sullivan.’

Sinead recognized the middle-aged man as one of the detectives who had questioned her earlier. He flicked an interested glance at Niall before returning his attention to her. ‘I have something to return to you. One of my men may have been a little over-zealous during the search of your apartment.’

Her heart dropped. They had taken some of her books, bank statements, papers relating to the museum and the rhinestone-covered corset she had worn on her first show and had never been able to part with. She doubted he was returning a book. She breathed a sigh of relief when he handed over the corset wrapped up in an opaque evidence bag.

Sinead signed the paperwork for the bag, handed over her passport and took the card which showed her next court date, before she hurried from the station. She had spent too much time here today.

She checked the remand date when she was in the Jeep. Tuesday week. They were obviously keeping close tabs on her. Well, she supposed a million francs bail made her a sort of criminal celebrity.

Niall eyed the bag. ‘Something important?’

‘Just some clothing.’ She smiled. ‘Now, feed me. I’m starving.’

In a small corner booth of an Italian restaurant, Niall ordered salmon, while she ordered a chicken breast and salad without dressing. A glass of white wine took the edge off her nerves and the grim reality of the day finally
hit her. She was on bail for a crime she hadn’t committed. Uncle Tim’s money was the only thing between her and a prison cell. She had lost her job and her reputation as a curator was almost destroyed.

As if he could read her thoughts, Niall covered her hand with his. ‘Everything will be okay when the stone turns up, I promise.’

She managed a half smile and wished she was as certain. ‘I hope so.’

Niall leaned back in his seat, dwarfing the small booth. ‘So tell me how you ended up in Geneva.’

‘I got a job offer at the Rheinbach. They needed someone to take care of their jewel collection.’

‘Sounds like you took care of it a bit too well.’

She narrowed her eyes at him. What was wrong with him? He was supposed to be here to help her. ‘Look, I’ve worked with precious stones and priceless works of art for seven years. I’m a professional curator, not a thief.’

The waiter arrived with a basket of grissini and a bowl of olives drenched in olive oil. She shuddered at the thought of the calories in those, but took a breadstick and crumbled the end of it.